I can’t quite picture it. What will happen during accelerated learning sessions?
You will notice significant differences before, during and after the session.
Before the Session
Ideally, we’ll start with a brief and focused meeting with a member of your senior management team. Together we’ll:
- Identify the specific improvements in business performance that are desired
- Pinpoint performance measures and begin to track them
Next, to get a clear picture we’ll collect information from the participants about:
- Their specific business issues and challenges
- Their learning style preferences
- Any potential hot buttons or turn-offs
We’ll collect this information through a combination of interviews, learning style inventories and participant profile questionnaires. Then, we’ll identify the specific topics and content to be covered during the session and recommend an approach that fits your group, topic and corporate culture. You’ll have a chance to review our recommendations and either approve them or suggest some changes. Often we use themes in our sessions. For example, we used a "hurry up offense" football theme for a senior management kick off retreat for a high technology company. Novations uses a simulation that involves running a lemonade stand to convey complex financial management concepts. For seminars, courses and workshops, we’ll provide a handy coaching guide to help your managers prepare the members of your team for the session.
At the Beginning of the Session
You’ll notice the difference as soon as you walk in the room. For example, instead of the standard classroom set up in rows, the seats will be clustered around tables in groups of 4 – 6. Even if the audience is conservative, there will be a hint of theming through one or two posters and relevant graphics for slides and handouts. If your group is open to creative approaches, we’ll pull out all the stops with energizing music or videos, decorations, and refreshments that fit the theme. At the beginning of our sessions, we don’t sit around deciding if we should wait five more minutes to see if everyone will arrive. Instead of frivolous get to know you icebreakers, we kick off the session with a short exercise that zeros in on key business challenges related. We’ll use this information throughout the session.
During the Session
Even if the audience is conservative, we’ll draw rich examples, analogies and metaphors from the session theme. We’ll avoid long presentations and lectures. Instead, participants will spend most of the session in group exercises, simulations, real world case studies, and peer coaching. If the audience is creative, we’ll use games, game shows, contests, and other upbeat approaches to convey any content that’s complex or tedious.
To ensure effectiveness, we won’t wait until the end of the session to do a traditional evaluation. Instead, we’ll stop at the end of the first morning and at the halfway mark to make sure that we are in sync with your group. As the session draws to a close, participants will develop a specific plan of action to take what they’ve learned back to the real world.
After the Session
We’ll provide a coaching guide to make it easy for managers to do follow up. We’ll track performance measures to ensure that the session had the desired impact.
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Where can I go on your site to find games on your site?
Our Spice of the Month e-zine is crammed with games, exercises and energizers.
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Where do I go to find free articles on your site?
Our featured spice (the current issue of our "Spice of the Month Accelerated Learning Ezine") is always free and accessible here. You can also access any of the over a dozen archived issues of Spice of the Month for a nominal cost through Our Spice Rack (our index).
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